Environmental impacts

Water
Industrialized agriculture with its high yield varieties are extremely water intensive. In the US, agriculture consumes 85% of all fresh water resources. For example, the Southwest uses 36% of the nations water while at the same time only receiving 6% of the country's rainfall.[citation needed] Only 60% of the water used for irrigation comes from surface water supplies. The other 40% comes from underground aquifers that are being used up in a way similar to topsoil that makes the aquifers,[citation needed] as Pfeiffer says, “for all intents and purposes non renewable resources.”[citation needed] The Ogallala Aquifer is essential to a huge portion of central and southwest plain states, but has been at annual overdrafts of 130-160% in excess of replacement. This irrigation source for America's bread basket will become entirely unproductive in another 30 years or so.[citation needed]
Likewise, rivers are drying up at an alarming rate. In 1997, the lower parts of China’s Yellow Rivrwere dry for a record 226 days. Over the past ten years, it has gone dry an average of 70 days a year.[citation needed] Famous lifelines such as the Nile and Ganges along with countless other rivers are sharing in the same fate.[citation needed] The Aral Sea has lost half its area and two-thirds its volume due to river diversion for cotton production.
Also the water quality is being compromised. In the Aral Sea, water salinization has wiped out all native fish, leaving an economy even more dependent on the agricultural model that originated the problem.[citation needed]
Fish are disappearing through another form of agricultural run off as well.[citation needed] When nitrogen-intensive fertilizers wash into waterways it results in an explosion of algae and other microorganisms that lead to oxygen depletion resulting in “dead zones”, killing off fish and other creatures.[citation needed]
Biodiversity
The spread of Green Revolution agriculture affected both agricultural biodiversity and wild biodiversity[citation needed]. There is little disagreement[citation needed] that the Green Revolution acted to reduce agricultural biodiversity, as it relied on just a few high-yield varieties of each crop.
This has led to concerns about the susceptibility of a food supply to pathogens that cannot be controlled by agrochemicals, as well as the permanent loss of many valuable genetic traits bred into traditional varieties over thousands of years. To address these concerns, massive seed banks such as Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research’s (CGIAR) International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (now Bioversity International) have been established (see Svalbard Global Seed Vault).
There are varying opinions about the effect of the Green Revolution on wild biodiversity. One hypothesis speculates that by increasing production per unit of land area, agriculture will not need to expand into new, uncultivated areas to feed a growing human population[citation needed]. A counter-hypothesis speculates that biodiversity was sacrificed because traditional systems of agriculture that were displaced sometimes incorporated practices to preserve wild biodiversity, and because the Green Revolution expanded agricultural development into new areas where it was once unprofitable or too arid.[citation needed]
Nevertheless, the world community has clearly acknowledged the negative aspects of agricultural expansion as the 1992 Rio Treaty, signed by 189 nations, has generated numerous national Biodiversity Action Plans which assign significant biodiversity loss to agriculture's expansion into new domains